Jagged Alliance 2

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Sirtech Canada proves they still know how to make turn-based gaming a lot of fun.

By IGN Staff

It's been about 5 years since the original Jagged Alliance was released and, although fans of the series had Jagged Alliance: Deadly Games to hold them over in the interim, they were waiting for a true sequel to put them back into the role of a mercenary leader working against the system to get the bills payed. Although it had been in the works for a few years, for a while there it looked liked Jagged Alliance 2 might not ever see the light of day. With Sirtech Publishing closing its doors in late 1998, Sirtech Canada was left to search for a new distributor to get its turn-based strategy title out on store shelves. Well, thanks goodness TalonSoft stepped in to circulate the project, because Jagged Alliance 2 is just as addictive and fun as its predecessor, and adds a few new nifty features and graphical tweaks to make it one game we wouldn't have wanted to miss.

Like the original, the plot is relatively simple and straight-forward. No aliens, high priestesses, or raging mages here. Jagged Alliance 2 takes place in a modern-world setting. You're a mercenary leader who has been hired by deposed ruler Enrico Chivaldori to free the small South American country Arulco from the clutches of a despotic queen, Deridranna. To accomplish this goal you have to recruit a rag-tag group of mercenaires to help you fight your way into the cities of Arulco, freeing the citizentry and gaining their trust along the way. With more victory comes more loyalty, and more of the population swayed to your way of thinking and away from Deridranna's.

If you've played any squad-based strategy game like X-COM or the original Jagged Alliance, you have a pretty good idea of how Jagged Alliance 2 works. Assemble a squad of stalwart mercs, equip them with an arsenal the National Guard would be envious of, and trudge into the heat of battle with bullets flying. While the combat is turn-based, giving you a chance to meticulously decide what your next move is, the game moves to realtime when you're not in a direct conflict with opposing forces. This blend of realtime action with turn-based strategy offers up a game that captures that addictive, up-all-night quality that I haven't seen in a while.

At the heart of the game are the mercenaries, the guys and gals you hire to shoot it out with the dictator's troops. Generally you're going to want to hire as many mercs as you can afford, insuring your chances of suvival from mission to mission. All hiring is done through various web-based mercenary services via your laptop, the most reputable and trustworthy of these being A.I.M. (the Association of International Mercenaries). Each of the different mercs is blessed with different skills (such as mechanics, markmanship, medical, demolitions, stealth, etc), and you'll be well advised to form a group that can handle a wide variety of situations since they will be the ones that you have to rely on to get almost anything accomplished in Arulco. Sure, it's nice to have a group of seven dead-eyes, but you sure will be begging for a doctor once three of them sustain heavy wounds. Of course, the better a mercs is, the more (s)he will cost to hire, so it's good to check out several profiles before jumping in and hiring the first person you run across.

The interface is pretty straight-forward, but loaded with information. While the game mainly revolves around combat, you have to play a few political cards in the process by talking with the local denizens and trying to enlist their help in your daunting task. You move your mercs on a gridded map with just a click of the mouse. Your main objectives are to capture towns that are scattered around the map from the enemy troops. As you win more and more battles, this tasks becomes increasing more difficult as the queen continues to send more of her elite troops after you. The time between shoot-outs is usually filled with training your mercs, healing the wounded, ordering more arms and ammo, training the locals to fight against any troops that may show up later, and simply resting up between incursions. The game can be somewhat slow going (but rewarding) in these periods as you have to carefully manage your resources (this includes your limited supply of ammo as well as your limited supply of mercs) to make the most out of the cash you're given. Fortunately you can make cash through liberating mines and performing other tasks for people you run into while fighting your way through Arulco. All of this troop management can be both a blessing and a curse, and it would have been nice to have some sort of central inventory allocation system instead of having to physically pass-out ammo and guns from mercenary to mercenary, but this attention to detail and realism is the stuff that hardcore strategy wargamers salivate over. It's also one of the things that makes Jagged Alliance 2 so playable. Even though the game is confined to one South American country, their are literally hundreds of areas to explore. This combined with an unlimited variety of merc, weapon, and ammo combinations make Jagged Alliance 2 a game with almost limitless replayability.

Of course, one of the deciding factors in any strategic wargame is how good the computer-controlled opponents are, and Jagged Alliance 2 boosts some pretty challenging AI. Enemy troops do a good job of using the terrain to their advantage, crouching behind rocks and falling prone behind fallen logs to obscure their bodies. This means that you can't simply overpower your enemies with a bum-rush, unless you're not afraid to lose a few mercs in the process.

The visuals aren't terrific but they're certainly passable, especially for a turn-based strategy game. You'll assess the combat action from an isometric view, at a much more pronounced angle than the original. While this is a typical view for strategy games, the high level of terrain detail in Jagged Alliance 2 makes it sometimes difficult to determine if you're indeed hidden from an enemy's line-of-sight if you're hiding behind an object. There were several times when I felt that one of my mercs was in a completely covered position out of harms way from the enemy, only to see them get hit the next round. The grunts themselves and other objects in the game do look a lot better than the original, but it was released nearly 5 years ago, so you would only expect a major graphic overhaul by now.

The sound in the game really adds some much needed spice to Jagged Alliance 2, and without the impressive audio quality, the game wouldn't have been nearly as enjoyable. Everything is recorded extremely well, and the individual weapons actually sound like their real-life counterparts, and completely different from one another. Squadmate voices are clean and crisp, but the repetitive canned dialogue gets rather annoying after only a few battles. One carry-over from the original is that you'll really learn a lot about your mercs by how they interact with one another vocally. If two particular mercs don't get along, they'll let you know, and they'll also give each other encouragement if someone pulls off a particularly sweet move. Like other squad-based combat games, you'll become attached to your squadmates the more you work with them. This makes their blood-screams when they get gunned down that much more painful.

So, while Jagged Alliance is an addictive, entertaining game with almost limitless replayability, it does have its share of flaws. One of the most obvious and painful is the number of gunshots it takes to incapacitate someone. Some of the enemies take three or four head shots before crumpling to the floor. Now I can understand if these were leg or torso shots, or even if the troops had a doctor and were getting medical attention in the heat of battle, but nobody is going to be able to take three shots to the head and continue shooting. At least fall down for a round or two.

Another problem is that you don't always get all of the items an enemy gunman was carrying. Sure, you'll be rewarded with a clip here and a gun there, but it's nowhere near the arsenal that the enemy force was carrying before you killed them. If I'm being shot at by a group of bad-asses with automatic rifles and all I have is pistols, you better believe that I want to pick up those guns to use after I waste them. This is especially frustrating considering how limited ammo is in the game. If I could just pick up all of the guns and ammo of my departed foes, resource management wouldn't be so time consuming. Since the developers went into so much depth to make Jagged Alliance 2 a fairly realistic squad-based strategy game, you would think that a little quirk like this wouldn't be overlooked in the final.

Another sad oversight is the lack of any multiplayer options. Jagged Alliance: Deadly Games had multiplay, so why not the full sequel? It would have been incredibly cool to take on the evil dictator with a few buddies but, alas, no such luck.

Even with the slight downfalls, I can't say enough good things about Jagged Alliance 2. In the end, the game offers up lots of fun without bogging you down in too much micro-management -- the bane of many turn-based strategy games. It will certainly keep you busy for a long time and is a game that's well worth the money spent. You're not going to want to miss this one if you're into turn-based strategy gaming, and it may have enough hooks without being too in-depth to attract a few action gamers as well.